Artospective: Paintings by Ben Howe from Australia.

Something to hold onto.

Ben Howe is an Australian artist who was born in London. Over the course of nearly two decades, he has explored the nature of consciousness, personal history and the incongruities of memory through his artwork, which generally takes the form of painterly investigations into the private and collective psyche.

From an early age, due to a combination of dyslexia and introspection, Ben found that he was more comfortable communicating his ideas visually. His creative expression has since found many paths – from street art to abstraction, hyper-realism, experimentation and surrealism.

Action, isolation and refraction surface as thematic currents in the practice of an artist whose work functions as a platform for broader considerations relating to the physical and subjective self within contemporary society. ‘Nothing is stranger than reality. My paintings often take aspects of ‘the real’ and present them in an alternative way. I tend to rearrange the chronology of elements so that they say something axiomatic or make more sense (from a certain point of view). Always anchored in the real world, they are combinations of documentation and poetry. ‘The process behind creating many of his works is laborious and complicated, with the generation of references often requiring as much effort as the works themselves. He believes in the value of long hours of labour, in not taking short cuts – of the power and agency of the ‘authentic’.

Ben has developed a signature quasi scientific aesthetic that is at once hyper-realistic yet reductive. His at times stark and lonely works are often derived from preliminary explorations in other media such as sculpture, photography and film; his process distorting the boundaries of the real and the perceived. In his ‘surface variation’ paintings, the initial subjects are produced in sculptural form and are then disassembled and reconfigured to form new compositions and meanings. Cut, broken, compacted and rearranged, they are often unrecognisable in the finished paintings, which are contemplations on the variability and fallibility of memory. Many of the sculptures have been spliced with photographic elements before being rendered in paint to further distort the boundaries between the real and the perceived. Disruptive to conventional paradigms of aesthetic beauty, these works depict a struggle to reconcile the sum of disparate elements with the initial archetype held in the unconscious.